Something of a Career

Introduction

My grandfather’s name was Omer Barnett. He was born in 1902—a big, boisterous man and farmer who could make anything out of wood or metal in the magical little shop out back next to the lumbering barn. When we visited the farm, Grandpa would put me and my older sister on the back of old Molly, the big docile milk cow, and lead us around the pasture to our immense delight (I’m not sure how Molly felt about it). I remember seeing him not wearing overalls only once, when he and my grandmother had been at some sort of gathering—maybe a funeral—and he was wearing pants with a belt. I also remember feeling a combination of confusion, wonder, and odd embarrassment at seeing Grandpa sign his name with a big “X” at the local bank.

At any rate, the time I was able to spend alone as a child and teenager with my grandparents on their farm was, for me, indescribably grounding. My parents would from time to time drop me off at the farm for a week, as I was a somewhat difficult child and even more difficult teenager, and we all needed a break from each other. For whatever reason, I seemed less difficult and perplexing to my grandparents, and I learned so much from them—the way they approached problems, worked together, spoke sometimes without speaking, and found value and beauty in noticing and appreciating what was around them.

I often wonder what Grandpa Omer would think about how my life has unfolded and what I’ve done to earn a living. I imagine he would likely ask, “And how has this put food on anyone’s table?” Meaning: How has this made the world a better place? And I thus must ask myself the question: Has what I have done the past 25 years made the world a better place? If I take a close look at where and how I’ve spent my time and energy in terms of research effort, I think there are some places where my efforts had a positive influence and other places where I could have done better. Let me share with you why I think so, and how I got there; you can then decide if my reasoning might be helpful for the study of groups and teams in general.

First, though, I thank INGRoup and Small Group Research for the opportunity to offer these thoughts as a recipient of the Joseph E. McGrath Award. Much of the research I’ve worked on with many collaborators over the years has focused on measuring, identifying, and specifying the patterns and timing of behaviors in teams that reliably distinguish higher- from lower-performing teams and lead to desired organizational outcomes. And many of the teams we’ve studied have worked in complex contexts filled with ambiguity, uncertainty, and stress. Because we accomplished much of this research with real organizational teams in the field (e.g., airline flight crews, nuclear power plant crews, emergency medical teams, seaport crisis management teams, and the like), the research studies involved negotiating access, obtaining security clearances, acquiring funding, waiting for teams to undergo regularly-scheduled simulation training, and doing (excruciating) systematic behavioral coding before data could ever be analyzed. This, added to the fact that I graduated with my Ph.D. at age 34 and published my first team dynamics journal article at age 38, means I have been active in team dynamics publishing at this writing for 25 years, in contrast to some much longer academic careers. My Google Scholar citation count decidedly does not number in the tens of thousands. You will also not find my name on highly-cited review articles or grand theories or meta-analyses with lots of famous co-author names. But this is what I do, and I am very happy doing it.

Transitioning to Academics

After my first semester of university study, I arrived home for holiday break and announced to my parents that I would never return to a university; the people were arrogant and the whole enterprise was a waste of time. My mother then announced to me that I should quickly figure out how to support myself and find a place to live, because my old bedroom was not available. Suddenly, university didn’t look so bad, but I had forfeited my music scholarship and I needed to change schools. My uncle, a physics professor, and my aunt helped me find a work-study job and a cheap basement apartment at their campus.

It didn’t take long for me to gravitate toward the US Air Force Reserve Officers Training Corps (AFROTC) and even become a member of the Drill Team, throwing real M1 rifles around in the air—not those fake plastic ones. Becoming a pilot seemed like a wonderful idea to me; additionally, the military courses interested me and I did well in them, as I could see a clear applied purpose to them. However, when I had my physical examination before boot camp, the scoliosis in my back (along with my near-colorblindness) was revealed, and I was told that pilot training would not be possible. Although my AFROTC experience ended, my interest in applied teamwork had begun.

Thanks in part to a scholarship from Tenneco Oil Company, I graduated with a BA in Petroleum Land Management and became a Landman (real job title!) for a multinational oil and gas firm in Denver, Colorado. I worked on cross-functional teams of a landman, geologist, geophysicist, engineer, and sometimes an economist in order to identify, analyze, prepare, and propose new drilling locations to management. I found the land and geology work moderately interesting, but I was captivated by how people interacted with each other. I saw new guys mimic the more powerful managers, down to even dressing exactly like them. I saw the guys who were influenced by smaller oil companies’ liberal use of sports tickets, steak dinners, private jets, and various other graft, propose deals to our managers that would privilege those smaller companies. I saw my very first real fistfight in our coffee room. What an education! But mostly I saw how people and teams reacted differently to situations of stress and time pressure. There were hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line when we pitched our analyses to management, and everyone knew everyone else’s success rates—and I was slowly turning into a better behavioral scientist than Landman.

A downturn in the oil and gas industry motivated me to leave and accept other jobs, including one as an automation instructor at Delta Air Lines and one as a supervisor in a small software development firm, where I again worked on teams of functional experts—this time, software analysts, and engineers—under time pressure to assemble new “builds” of software releases. By this time, I had earned an MS in Management Science, majoring in Information Systems, so this work context made some sense to me. However, some of my professors had suggested I get a Ph.D., and this idea seemed more appealing than constantly rushing to build updates and fixes for powerful, cranky clients. So I gladly accepted the professors’ offers to write letters for me, was amazed to be accepted to some reasonable schools, and I began graduate work at the University of Texas at Austin business school largely because my sister and her family lived there.

The first year of the Ph.D. program was rocky. Living on the $700/month stipend proved to be more difficult than I had anticipated, so I accepted an offer from an old oil and gas friend to moonlight and (secretly) do land programing on the side at night to supplement my income. Of course, that meant combining very little sleep with lots of reading and coursework for my first year of the program—not a particularly wise move. I was also constantly reprimanded in class for bringing up practical examples of behavior that I had seen over the prior 10 years in industry that contradicted the organizational behavior theories we were discussing. That was not to be done, I was told. The fact that I was not fitting in very well was made crystal clear when I failed my big summer paper assignment after leaving for the summer at the end of my first year for temporary work as a petroleum land consultant in Denver. My stipend did not cover the summer months, and I needed to eat, so I figured I would write my paper while in Denver; however, as I later learned upon my return in the fall, this sent a “negative message” to the faculty about my “commitment” to the program, which was reflected in my paper grade. I quickly apologized profusely for leaving, reworked my paper, and was given a passing grade. Thus I learned early on about this odd perceptual dance in academics. It had somehow seemed more above board in industry.

Focusing on Teams

Things went fairly well after that. I passed my comprehensive exams and took a few elective courses, one of which was Robert Helmreich’s seminar on Group Dynamics. Bob was a full professor in Social Psychology; there were about seven of us in the course, which was held at Bob’s offices off campus, paid for by his NASA/Federal Aviation Administration grant. We sat around a big conference table and dissected group dynamics classics as well as newer empirical work on flight crews and all sorts of very interesting types of teams doing complex tasks under time pressure. Now this was research I could really relate to! But when I rushed back to the business school to tell my adviser about my find, I was told not to study teams for my dissertation—it would take way too long, and besides, there was no “teams” person on the business school faculty to supervise me. Luckily, Bob took me under his wing, giving me a desk and computer in his lab, procuring an FAA jumpseat pass for me so I could fly around the country in 737 cockpits and observe flightcrew interactions, and agreeing to be the co-chair of my dissertation. Along with studying air traffic control dyads managing live traffic, I studied three-person 727 crews as they dealt with nonroutine events in a simulated flight for my dissertation.

I successfully defended my dissertation in 1995 and accepted a job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; my former business school faculty members who were skeptical warmed a bit to the idea of my studying teams like flight crews after the dissertation was awarded Best Dissertation from the APA Division 49 (Group Psychology & Group Psychotherapy) – thank you forever to Dick Moreland – and the empirical paper was awarded Best Paper from a Dissertation from the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management. But it wasn’t until 1999 that the paper appeared as an Academy of Management Journal publication. That was a tough 4 years. Thinking it would result in faster results, I tried publishing studies like a Gersick-like lab-based simulation which resulted in an exploration of punctuated equilibrium and task factors under shifting deadlines, but I didn’t find these studies as fun as working with real team members in contexts that mattered to them.

Around the same time, I was invited to present my 727 crew findings as a poster at an industrial engineering conference. I felt pretty out of place being the only non-engineer there and probably looked miserable when a group of guys walked up and started talking with me. They actually seemed interested in the timing of adaptive behaviors in the crews, and said, “You’d probably find something similar in our nuclear power plant crews.” They were engineers from the largest nuclear power facility in the US. I said, “Well, if you invite me to your plant, we can find out.” No kidding—I really said this. They did invite me, which led to my visiting their plant and others, and eventually not one, but three studies of nuclear power plant crews and the dissertation of my Tulane Ph.D. student and wonderful collaborator, Seth Kaplan. As my mother often said, “Don’t ask, don’t get.” These studies wound up being published in Management Science, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Journal of Organizational Behavior. But it all took time, and to extend my tenure clock, I moved from my first job to a second, and then to a third at Tulane University, where I earned tenure in 2002.

In all, a research focus on teams seemed to be going pretty well. My other Tulane Ph.D. student Gazi Islam had defended his dissertation, and my partner Birgit (without whose support I would have no career at all) and I had been considering moving to Europe when Hurricane Katrina closed Tulane University for a year, which helped motivate our move to Maastricht University in the Netherlands. As part of the promotion-to-full professor (Hoogleraar) process there, one is given a short meeting with the University president and the University rector. During my meeting, the president made the mistake of saying, as people will say, “If there was ever anything I might do to help with your research program, let me know.”

“Well,” I said (in typical “don’t ask, don’t get” form), “actually. . . could you please introduce me to the president of the Port of Rotterdam?” My Ph.D. student Sjir Uitdewilligen (another wonderful collaborator) and I really wanted to study teams there, and the president’s introduction for us led to Sjir’s dissertation research at the Port. I later learned that my ask of the president was somehow inappropriate; why is still a mystery to me. Overall, our years in the Netherlands were wonderful; Birgit and I even passed the national Dutch language examination! I loved the “Burgundian” Limburg culture, the food, the countryside, and the proximity to Birgit’s family in Germany. I met many outstanding new colleagues across Europe including Franziska Tschan, Norbert Semmer, Josette Gevers, Gudela Grote, Michaela Kolbe, Fred Zijlstra. . . way too many to list everyone here. Unfortunately, my father died during our third year there, and my elderly mother asked us to please move closer to her US location—thus our move back to North America, to York University in Toronto, where we spent the next 9 ½ years and where Birgit earned her Ph.D.

During our time in Canada, I worked with three amazing Ph.D. students who all were, interestingly, engineers and who completed dissertations on aspects of team dynamics using systematic behavioral observation for quantitative analyses (see Waller & Kaplan, 2018): Golnaz Tajeddin, Serena Golchehreh Sohrab, and Marzieh Saghafian. What a great crew! They taught me so much about so many different things—involving both team dynamics and life lessons. I also learned about the outstanding efforts of Ontario Mine Rescue, part of Workplace Safety North, which trains underground mine rescue teams for the entire province of Ontario. I took a chance and wrote a letter explaining what type of research I do to Alex Gryska, who led OMR at the time, and pitched the idea of collaborating. Alex contacted me a few weeks later. We met in a restaurant, talked about applied behavioral observation research, and Seth Kaplan and I spent the next 3 years watching and collecting data from the most hard-working, amazing teams I’ve ever seen. Again: Don’t ask, don’t get.

Conclusion

So. . . has what I’ve done the past 25 years made the world a better place? In my mind, there are only two possible ways I can answer that question in the affirmative. The first is by virtue of the type of team I have tended to study: control teams in high-reliability contexts. ¹ Most of our studies of these teams have used their own organizations’ performance measures as dependent variables to categorize the teams as lower- or higher-performing. If anything my collaborators and I uncovered in our analyses of the behaviors that distinguish the lower- from higher-performing teams has informed the training and preparation of these teams and has improved overall team performance, then we’ve done well, and we’ve done well for the lives these teams touch.

Does this mean that one must study teams in extreme contexts in order to have positive influence? No! But it certainly means that doing good team dynamics research is like a good golf swing (never thought you’d see a sports metaphor here, did you?): Follow through is crucial. Due to the oft-held notion that teamwork is either nonsense or magical pixie dust, team researchers have an added responsibility to translate their research outcomes into practical, usable information beyond the implications section of a journal article. Imagine what we could change if we all did this. Organizations of all types rely heavily on teams to make critical decisions and handle unexpected problems, among many other functions. Their teams could be so much more efficient if we were more efficient at translating our knowledge into usable forms.

The second way I might be able to answer in the affirmative is through teaching. For many years, I’ve taught my team dynamics course to MBA students; now as Senior Research Scholar in the College of Business at Colorado State University, I also have the opportunity to teach a variation to undergraduate students. As you might imagine, the course is heavy on evidence-based information and experiential learning. On the first day of class, the very first thing I ask students to do is to think of an actual team they’ve worked on that they would consider was a high-performing team. Together as a class on a big board, they make a list of all the one-word adjectives and descriptors they can think of that fit these teams. They generally list words like: trust, competent, motivated, punctual, humor, prepared, communication, flexible, leadership, cohesive, positive, and so on. Then I ask them to think of an actual team they’ve worked on that was a real stinker, low-performing team. We make another list of adjectives and descriptors like: dishonest, freeloading, selfish, conflict, disorganized, negative, uncooperative, bullies, unmotivated, and so on.

We step back and look at both lists. Then I look at the class and say, “Well, based on your team experiences, you clearly already know what makes a low-performing team and what makes a high-performing team. There is research evidence that backs up everything on your lists. You really don’t need this class, do you? You already know what makes a team good and what makes a team stink! This is going to be a very short course!” Some nervous giggles ensue, then silence, until someone says, inevitably, “Well, wait. . . maybe it’s not quite that simple. . . .”

“Oh?” I say. “Why is it not that simple?”

And that is where the learning begins—by removing the idea that teamwork is simple and replacing it with actionable knowledge of team dynamics. If we can do that, and help improve the team experience for students and their teams wherever their lives and careers take them—for their businesses, mosques, farms, hospitals, synagogues, laboratories, governments, churches, daycares, police departments, families—then we have done good in the world.

I like to believe Grandpa Omer would approve.